E Goldratt - The Goal

"Yeah, Alex, I want to stay here and continue what you've started. I want to be the new plant manager. You caused us to change almost every rule in production. You forced us to view production as a means to satisfy sales. I want to change the role production is playing in getting sales."

"Fine with me. But Bob, when you nail those procedures," and to myself I add, 'if/ "will you consider taking on responsibil- ity for all the plants in the division?"

"You bet, boss. I'll teach 'em a trick or two."

"Let's drink to it," I say. And we toast with our coffee.

"Who do you suggest should take your place?" I ask him. "Frankly, I'm not impressed with any of your superintendents."

"Unfortunately, I agree with you. The best would be Stacey, but I don't give it much chance she'd take it."

"Why don't we ask her. You know what? Let's call both Stacey and Ralph in and discuss your idea."

"So, at last you found him," Stacey says to Bob, as she and Ralph enter the room, each loaded with papers.

"Yes, Stacey," I answer. "And it definitely looks like a promis- ing idea. But before that, there's another thing that we'd like to discuss with you. We've just agreed that Bob will take my place as plant manager. How about you taking his place as production manager?"

"Congratulations, Bob." They both shake his hand. "That's no surprise."

Since Stacey hasn't answered my question, I continue, "Think about it, you don't have to answer now. We know that you love your job and that you don't want the burden of all the per-

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sonnel problems that go with being a production manager, but we both think that you'd do a fantastic job."

"You bet," Bob adds his two cents.

She looks calmly at me, and says, "Last night I was lying in bed, praying. I was praying that this job would be offered to me."

"Done," Bob shouts quickly.

"Now that you've accepted," I say to Stacey, "can you tell us why you want this job so badly?"

"Looks like being a material manager," Bob booms, "is start- ing to be boring around this plant-not enough expediting, not enough rush calls... I didn't know that you liked that type of excitement."

"No, I didn't, and I don't. That's why I was so happy with our new method, timing the release of material according to the bottlenecks' consumption. But you know my fear, what happens if new bottlenecks pop up?

"What my people and I have done is to examine daily the queues in front of the assembly and in front of the bottlenecks- we call them 'buffers.' We check just to be sure that everything that's scheduled to be worked on is there-that there are no 'holes.' We thought that if a new bottleneck pops up it would immediately show up as a hole in at least one of these buffers. It took us some time to perfect this technique, but now it's working smoothly.

"You see, whenever there's a hole in a buffer-and I'm not talking about just the work that's supposed to be done on a given day, but the work for two or three days down the road-we go and check in which work center the materials are stuck. And then..."

"And then you expedite!" Bob jumps in.

"No, nothing of the sort. We don't break setups, or light a fire. We just point out to the foreman of that work center which job we would prefer he gets to next."

"That's very interesting," I say.

"Yeah. And it became even more interesting when we real- ized that we were visiting the same six or seven work centers every time. They're not bottlenecks, but the sequence in which they perform their jobs became very important. We call them 'capacity constraint resources,' CCR for short."

"Yeah, I know all about it. Those foremen have become al-

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most dependent on your people to prioritize their work," Bob says. "But Stacey, you're not answering our question."

"I'm coming to it. See, these holes have become more and more dangerous lately-sometimes to the extent that assembly has to deviate significantly from their scheduled sequence. And it's become apparent that the foremen of the CCRs have more and more difficulty supplying on time. Ralph was telling me that these work centers still have enough capacity, and maybe on the average he's right, but I'm afraid that any additional increase in sales will throw us into chaos."

So here's a bomb, ticking below our feet, and I didn't even realize it. I'm pressing so hard on marketing to bring more sales, and according to what Stacey's just revealed that might blow up the whole plant. I'm still trying to digest it when she continues.

"Don't you realize that we've concentrated our improvement efforts too narrowly? We tried so hard to improve our bottle- necks, when what we should do is improve the CCRs as well. Otherwise we'll run into an 'inter-active' bottleneck situation.

"See, the key is not in the hands of the materials people. If interactive bottlenecks emerge, chaos is inevitable; we'll have to expedite all over the place."

"So what are you suggesting?" I ask.

"The key is in the hands of production. These techniques to manage the buffers should not be used just to track missing parts while there is still time, they should be used mainly to focus our local improvement efforts. We must guarantee that the improve- ments on the CCRs will always be sufficient to prevent them from becoming bottlenecks.

"Alex, Bob, that's why I want this job so badly. I want to make sure that the material manager's job will continue to be boring. I want to demonstrate how local improvements should be managed. And I want to show all of you how much more throughput we can squeeze from the same resources."

"What about you Ralph, it's your turn to surprise me." "What do you mean?" he says in his quiet voice. "It looks like everyone around here has a pet project. What ace are you hiding up your sleeve?"

He smiles gently, "No aces, just a wish."

We all look at him encouragingly.

"I've started to like my job. I feel like I'm part of a team."

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We all nod in approval.

"It's not just me and the computer anymore, trying to fiddle with inaccurate or untimely data. People really need me now, and I feel like I'm contributing. But you know what? I think that the change, at least as it relates to my function, is very fundamental. What I'm holding in my files is data. What you are usually asking for is information. I always regarded information as those sec- tions of the data which are needed in order to make a decision- and for that, let me admit it, for most decisions my data was simply unsuitable. Remember the time we were trying to find the bottlenecks?" He looks at each of us in turn. "It took me four days to admit that I simply couldn't find the answer. What I started to realize is that information is something else. Informa- tion is the answer to the question asked. The more I am able to do it, the more a part of the team I become.

"This bottleneck concept has really helped me to move along these lines. Let's face it, today the plant obeys a schedule that's. released from the computer.

"What's my wish, you ask? I want to develop a system that'll help in what Bob wants to do, that will help to shrink drastically the time and effort needed to engineer a sale, as he calls it. I want to develop a system to help Stacey manage the buffers, and even to help in managing the local improvements. I want to develop a system to help Lou measure, in a much more beneficial way, the local performance. You see, like everyone else, I have my dreams."

It's quite late, the kids are already fast asleep. Julie and I are sitting in the kitchen; we're each holding a warm cup of tea in our hands. I tell her about what happened today at the plant. She seems to be more than mildly interested; she actually claims that she finds it fascinating.